Fagg hits all the racist notes about immigration with the kind of subtlety one would expect to find in a Richard Spencer recruitment ad

in his candidacy.

Perhaps seeing his chances fading, Fagg has taken a hard right turn in the past few weeks, boasting at nearly every campaign event about being the only candidate who has deported criminals and leaping on board the President’s xenophobic, factually challenged calls for more aggressive action against migrants.

None of that prepared me for the ad the Fagg campaign released yesterday, though. In a couple of decades of closely watching Montana politics, I can’t remember a more overtly racist appeal in an ad by a major candidate. Fagg hits all the racist notes about immigration with the kind of subtlety one would expect to find in a Richard Spencer recruitment ad: scary images of Hispanic men, a deep voice intoning about “black and white,” grainy yellow-tone photos of gang members, and the specious claim that their activities “threaten America.”

I assume that this ad is the opening salvo of the last phases of the Fagg campaign: to depict the former Judge as someone who was tough on criminals while relying on coded racist imagery and language to appeal to the hooded base of the Montana GOP. It’s incredibly depressing that Russ Fagg thinks sinking to this desperate low will save a flailing campaign, but it’s even more depressing to imagine that someone this racist was a judge for two decades.

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Don Pogreba

Don Pogreba is an eighteen-year teacher of English, former debate coach, and loyal, if often sad, fan of the San Diego Padres and Portland Timbers. He spends far too many hours of his life working at school and on his small business, Big Sky Debate.
His work has appeared in Politico and Rewire.
In the past few years, travel has become a priority, whether it's a road trip to some little town in Montana or a museum of culture in Ísafjörður, Iceland.